Homeschooling for Free

If your budget is so tight that you can’t afford to homeschool, does that mean you should quit and send your kids to (free) public school?

No way! Thankfully, we live in an era quite unlike our parents or even homeschoolers of just a decade ago. Because of the Internet, we can homeschool our children for next to nothing.

I buy curriculum sometimes. I also make my own (which is free). I’ve discovered the hard way that nothing is really free. It either costs time or money. If you have enough time, you can certainly spend very little money. If you have money but no time, then buy curriculum. If you have neither time nor money, check out some of my blog posts on how to increase your income.

If I had to do everything for free, these are some excellent choices:

Free General Resources

Curriculum Share – give and get free curriculum, with only the price of shipping

Printer ink and paper are expensive! Be creative in your homeschooling, and if printing a lot of worksheets, remember that the price of a workbook might be cheaper than printing pages at home yourself. (It might be worth it to keep track of your printing expenses for a month, to see what you’re paying per page. This website gives national averages for several countries.)

Free Writing Resources

If you think about it, writing is just learning to talk slowly. If you can teach your kids to talk, then you can teach them to write. Also, writing improves when you study the writing techniques of good writers. Again, the Bible contains the best examples of writing!

Discussing what you read together from the Bible. (Again, writing is just slow talking.)

Having your children tell back to you (“narrate”) what they are learning from the Bible. As they talk, Mom should write (or type) their words onto paper.

Learn how a Bible passage is put together by outlining it together. Try to “put it back together again” in written form by looking at the outline.

Comments

I ran across An Old Fashioned Education: http://oldfashionededucation.com/index.html (Click on Full Curriculum on the left to see resources broken down by grade level.) This is an wealth of links to public domain texts and living books available for free online. Miss Maggie has done an excellent job of laying out a full curriculum for each grade level, using almost entirely free books. We’ll be using her outline this year for all grades of history and literature.

I’ll second what Mary said. I combine both Ambleside Online and Old Fashioned Education with my two 8 year olds. We get the best of both to meet the needs of my children. Harmony Art Mom has good suggetions for art and music, although she does have a curriculum for sale too, and a wonderful nature study section which is free. I’m going to have fun going through your listing and seeing what I can glean, if not for this year, then to have if and when we need it. Thank you for all your work and blessings on your school year.

Welcome!

Hi, my name is Anne. While you’re sipping on a nice cup of something hot, you’ll find lots of help for wives and moms — all about how to find joy in your marriage, parenting, homeschooling, and homemaking. My goal is to always point you to Scripture, so grab your Bible!